Here’s to Being Deliriously Happy
A couple days ago, I was getting ready to submit my last college paper while sitting in a coffee shop. The sounds of espresso beans grinding, milk frothing, and names being called were the perfect white noise for me to push away the looming existential crisis I’d surely have if I dwelled on the finality of the assignment. Fortunately for me, the mix of senioritis and regular procrastination meant I was so down to the wire with writing the paper that my brain locked in on just finishing it—finality be damned. That is, until I overheard two guys talking nearby.
“Yeah, I’m a freshman, so…”
I didn’t hear the rest—I didn’t need to hear the rest. There I was, cursor hovering over “submit” on my final assignment of college, and the person not even two feet away was just beginning his college experience.
Oh, hey Existential Crisis! Welcome back. I was starting to think you weren’t going to show. Nope, you’re right on time. Come on in. Oh—you brought Doubt and Fear with you? Fab. I love unexpected guests. No, the more the merrier, truly.
There are a lot of ways I could have covered the topics of college/graduating/endings/beginnings this week. A lot of my friends have either already graduated or, like me, are graduating in just a few days. It’s the subject of most of our conversations these days, so it would make sense that I’d be drawn to write about it, but this week I just… wasn’t. For months now, it feels that this has been The Topic—inspirational, nostalgic, sappy musings on the transition from student to graduate. I expected I’d tire of it at some point, but I didn’t expect it to be the literal week of graduation. Alas, here we are. I don’t want to tell you about some inspirational epiphany I had or shine a spotlight on the magnitude of gratitude and nostalgia as I prepare to cross that stage. Instead, I want to talk about failure and happiness, without the fluff.
When I was a senior in high school, I delivered the student commencement speech. The prompt given to me for the speech asked me to reflect on a piece of advice I would give to an incoming freshman. So, on a hot June day, I stood in front of my entire graduating class and told them that I hoped they would fail in college. I described the ways in which we defined failure in high school—be it by grades, friends, or extracurriculars. I hoped, as we began again as freshmen in college, we would have the courage to fail in big ways that we hadn’t in high school, and then possessed the fight to pick ourselves up and succeed ten times harder.
It’s like the Universe heard me say that and said, “Oh! Okay. Heard. You want to fail? Here you go.” I spent the first year and a half (give or take) of my college career feeling like I had failed in so many colorful ways I couldn’t have even imagined when I was giving that speech. Logic would suggest that hearing this freshman in the coffee shop, as I prepared to dust my hands off after completing 16 years of nonstop school, would make me want to give him the same advice—fail big; succeed bigger. Ironically, that’s not at all what came to mind. Instead, I was reminded of an inconsequential, five minute conversation I’d had with a professor at my first college.
It was near the end of the semester, and this professor—who doubled as my assigned freshman year advisor—was meeting with all dozen or so of us in her class individually for check-ins as we prepared for finals. At that point, I had already decided I was transferring. I’m pretty sure my first transfer application was already sent in. This professor did not know me well, though, and she asked me all the compulsory questions.
How has your first semester been?
What are your plans for next semester?
Why are you transferring?
How do your friends feel about you transferring?
Are your parents worried about you transferring?
Where do you want to transfer to?
My answers were short, clipped, and probably failed miserably at hiding the cynicism I felt. The smile on my face had been painted on all semester, and I didn’t want to get into how hard it had been for me with this woman who didn’t know me well. These conferences were meant for students to chart their next few years at this school; I was obligated to attend mine, regardless of my transfer plans, and I wanted to get in and out as painlessly as possible.
As I gathered my belongings to leave, she stepped outside of the advisor-y thread of conversation.
“My daughter transferred,” she revealed. “She ended up at a very different school, and when she got there, she was just deliriously happy. You’ll find that.”
It was a kind sentiment, and for the first time, my painted on smile cracked to reveal a true one. I thanked her and left, appreciating her well wishes but doubting that I would get to that point during college. “Deliriously happy” became my goal for life, though. I wanted a moment where I looked back and thought, I get what she meant. Would I get it in college? Not necessarily. And I was okay with that.
Once again, logic and sentimentality would suggest that I arrived at my soon-to-be alma mater and immediately got that perfect happily ever after. And in fact, in the bout of nostalgia that oversaturates all things Graduation™, it would be easy for me to look back on my college experience with those rose-colored glasses and pass on that happily ever after to anyone who asked. We have plenty of that, though. I’ve certainly indulged in my fair share of extracting all the good from my last few years and arranging them in a mosaic of perfectly romanticized college moments as I prepare to close this chapter. That mosaic lacks depth, though. Depth and truth. And if someone asked me now what advice I’d give to a freshmen, I’d only want to give them an honest picture.
College is hard—even when you’re in the right place. The ages of 18-22 can feel like a second adolescence, except no one talks about it the way they do when you’re in middle school. The very nature of the college experience is very unnatural; you are constantly in a bubble with people your age, often surrounded by people with very similar dreams to yours, and though you spend a lot of time on your own, being independent, you are also being perceived nearly 100% of that time because you are always around people. In the US, we are given a prepackaged expectation for the ideal college experience: the tailgates, the games, the parties, the late nights. It’s not that this experience isn’t there, and it’s not that it doesn’t live up to the hype. It’s that this experience does not—cannot—account for your 24/7. And when you walk into those four years with the idea that it will, every moment that it doesn’t feels like you’re failing at having the right experience.
At the beginning, you might feel like you are playing the part of a college student, going through the motions but not really feeling like one. It’s because you are playing the part of one, until you know what it’s like to be one. If you’re far from home—from people and places you love—you might spend a lot of days feeling stretched taut, suspended between two versions of yourself and your life that you love equally. There are going to be moments when your friends are going out and you just want a night in, and being okay with staying back might be new. Then, of course, the opposite will happen. You’ll have days where it feels like you should be doing more—doing more to get that internship or to chip away at your school work or to explore your college city or… or… or…. Looking to your right and left will leave you markedly off-center and you’ll have to learn to be comfortable with planting your feet right where you are even if it means just standing still. You’ll miss class and it will be the wrong call. You’ll miss class and it will be the right call. You won’t prepare enough for an exam and then you’ll stress yourself out too much over the next one. Many, many days will feel gratingly ordinary—so unlike the College Experience™ that you’ll panic about whether A) that experience exists and B) if it does, if you are running circles around yours and missing it entirely.
So here’s the truth:
The College Experience™ does exist, but it only exists in moments. And you’ll know when you’re in those moments because they are the ones when, in the back of your mind, a small voice trills that you are, without a doubt, deliriously happy. Those moments are not constant, they are not a destination, and the ordinary, hard days fill in the gaps between them, but they are real.
Ironically, as someone who hates the beach, the best way I’ve ever been able to articulate this experience is by likening it to collecting seashells on the beach. When you go searching for seashells on the beach, you don’t expect to find a dozen of them right away in one spot by the shore. No—you have to walk a bit, sometimes along long stretches of dull pebbles and dusty sand, before you find one or two. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, you find a couple all in the same spot, but other times, you have to get on your hands and knees and claw under sand’s surface before your fingers close around one. You keep them close, though, and when you unfurl them from your pockets and shirt folds, you’ve amassed an entire collection.
Being deliriously happy—the College Experience™—are those seashells.
My first few weeks after transferring, I found great friends and relished in how easy the transition was. Between girls’ nights and roommate yap sessions about nothing at all, I thought I’d found it; I was, without a doubt, deliriously happy. It happened sooner than I expected, and I wished I could tell that former advisor that I knew what she meant. I thought it was a destination to be claimed.
Then, classes got busier, roommates moved in and out, LA fatigue set in, and the monotony of ordinary life found its equilibrium with that magical college feeling. The deliriously happy wasn’t bubbling over the way it had. Maybe I was wrong, I thought. Maybe that wasn’t what she meant.
But then I had a really fun class that led me to four best friends, and every week we went to dinner at what became our usual spot. Deliriously happy. I laughed until I had tears rolling down my face. Deliriously happy. I stayed out entirely too late and regretted it in my 9:00 AM classes. Deliriously happy. Bit by bit, I collected these moments like seashells. They didn’t happen all at once, and they weren’t a perma-state of life. But they existed, and I was so entirely, all-consumingly, deliriously happy during them that I learned a very important lesson—just because something is not permanent does not mean that it is not important and, most of all, unequivocally real. Understanding this shifted my mindset around what that advisor said. Whereas I used to take “deliriously happy” as a goal—a landing place—I now take it as a guide post. In those moments, when the voice in the back of my head whispers the words in revelry, I know that I am in the right place and that I’ve found another seashell to add to the collection.
Four years ago I told my graduating class to fail in college. I took my own advice tenfold, and while I learned a lot, it’s not what I would’ve told that freshman who was waiting for his coffee while I finished up my last college assignment. I would have told him to look for the seashell moments and hold on to them—but not to panic when he’s walking for a while, seemingly only finding sand and rocks. I would have told him that the College Experience™ cannot be your 24/7, but that does not mean A) that it doesn’t exist and B) that in the span of time when ordinary life fills in the gaps, that you are doing college wrong.
And I would have told him that I hope he finds his deliriously happy here. When I take off the rose-colored glasses that have tinged my vision with nostalgia over the last few weeks, I can still say—truthfully—that in all the hard, ordinary days, I found mine. Those years ago, I may not have gotten advice for class planning or job searching in that advisor meeting, but I did get those two words that changed a lot for me. I can only hope that, in passing them down, they change a lot for someone else.